Q: What if I think I was the victim of a wrongly pushed pot before?

A: If you have a hand history, send it to our support people. If you want to ask our support folks for your most recent 1000 hands or so, feel free. If you can find (and we confirm) a wrongly pushed pot, we’ll ship you $500 for each occurrence. If you were the true winner of the pot and it wasn’t pushed to you, we’ll send you double the size of the pot plus the $500.

During the hand in question, there was a player who had missed the blinds and been asked to post a dead blind in the cutoff. He didn’t, but somehow there was a perfectly timed lag between the client and the server that caused him to have a “Fold” button presented (though he may or may not have seen it). Probably unknowingly, he clicked a non-existent “Fold” button, which went through to the server. The server has code built in to protect it from extraneous messages such as this (including malicious intent from hacked clients). But it turned out that it didn’t have that protection from a dead blind-posting player if the message was something that shouldn’t have been coming in anyway (e.g. a “Fold” from somebody who shouldn’t be allowed to fold in the first place).

The result of all this was for the system to believe that it had a side-pot between the sitting-out player and the small blind (the guy with the kings). It evaluated that pot, awarded that pot to the small blind, and then had no more pots to award, so it ended the hand.

We’ve fixed the code and are testing it. There’s a pretty good chance we could have gone another four years before we saw this again, but obviously we’re not going to wait and find out. The $500 offer I mentioned above stands; we think we’ve got this one beaten.

As regards the people who were involved in the meteor-strike pot, we’re going to treat it like a bad beat jackpot. We’re going to ship $500 to the guy who had the ace of trump and should have won the pot in the first place, $250 to the OP in this thread for reporting it, and spread $250 around the other players who were dealt in, including the mystery player who wasn’t dealt in but managed to fold anyway. Were it not for him, we’d have never found and removed this bug.